Favorite links: long reads

Since it’s been literally months since I did one of these link posts, I decided to round up my favorite longer, more in-depth reads this time. There are a couple shorter articles thrown in here too. Here’s my favorite, the poem “Kindness”: “before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.”

What it takes to be truly great: you’ve probably heard of the “10,000 hour rule”, but did you know it’s a popularized – and often misinterpreted – version of the concept of “deliberate practice”? This is an interview with the psychologist who researches expertise and deliberate practice (he also wrote a book about it, which I recommend).

Food and medicine

Chemophobia is irrational, harmful, and hard to break: “The distinction between natural and synthetic chemicals is not merely ambiguous, it is non-existent. The fact that an ingredient is synthetic does not automatically make it dangerous, and the fact that it is natural doesn’t make it safe.”